How does he do it?: Once again, C. Hitchens manages to break it all down.

A time is approaching when those who speak so glibly about Muslim grievances and Muslim feelings are going to have to make up their minds. In Iraq, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi has now issued two statements denouncing the very concept of "democracy" as a blasphemous Greek term alien to the Arab and Muslim world and inviting anathema and murder on all those who even rehearse for it. For good measure, he denounces Shiite Islam as a detestable heresy in itself. And for convenience, he names his organization "Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia," with what seems like the endorsement of Osama Bin Laden.

On the other side of this battle, senior Shiite clergy have described voting as a religious duty, have foresworn personal revenge on Sunni and Baathist elements, and have made public assurances that they do not wish for a Khomeini-style theocratic regime in their country.

And even when I thought that he was unusually, wrong, on something, he stands by his position, and it turns out he was right all along.

In a rather bewildered tone, the New York Times has been reporting on the political renaissance of Ahmad Chalabi, now increasingly the public spokesman of the mainstream Shiite coalition and No. 10 on its electoral list. (Chalabi? But surely he is a discredited con man, tool of the neocons, stranded without a popular base and exposed as a trickster?) The Times having taken this view, it must seem odd when it discovers and reports that Chalabi has been sent by the Shiite leadership to tell Tehran to stay out of the process or that when he returned from Iran to defy the trumped-up CIA charges against him, he was given a Kurdish peshmerga escort all the way to Najaf.

Good thing the CIA wasn't succesful in totally marginalizing Chalabi, he may be key to bridging the sides.

A photograph of Chalabi, addressing a large Shiite meeting in the south of Iraq, appeared in the Times of the Sunday before last. What the story did not say, in the words of one of his close aides to me recently, was that "Dr. C brought a group of Sunni leaders to the Shi'a heartland in order to show both sides that our list is not sectarian. We then took the Sunnis to Najaf to let them see the Imam Ali shrine for the first time in their lives. It was a great moment." This contrasts rather boldly with the pathetic liberal default position that violence, and ethnic and religious difference, demand that the elections be "postponed."

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